Memories of Flight 255 Still Vivid After 30 Years [REPORT]
Rick Pluta and Pat Batcheller discuss Michigan’s deadliest aviation disaster.
Editor’s note: the following is a first-person remembrance.
I was helping my brother move into a house in rural Wayne County on August 16, 1987. It was warm and muggy. The forecast that evening called for a chance of thunderstorms. As we stood in the living room of his new place on Arsenal Road, we heard a siren outside — the kind you’d hear if a tornado warning were issued. We turned on the radio. We heard no weather warnings, just news — terrible news. A few miles from where we stood, Northwest Airlines Flight 255 from Detroit to Santa Ana, Calif. via Phoenix had crashed seconds after takeoff from Metro Airport. It happened at 8:46 p.m. The siren, I presume, was from one of the area fire departments, a signal to its first responders to report for duty.
My senior year at the University of Michigan was about to begin. I was nearing the end of my journalism internship at WDIV-TV. It was almost two years before I got my first real job in radio. Rick Pluta was a reporter for United Press International at the time. He, too, remembers that evening.
“I was getting to the end of my shift, it was getting to be twilight when we got word that something had happened at Metro,” Rick recalls. He started heading for the scene. Traffic was already backing up on I-94 near the airport.
“So I got on the shoulder and drove very fast until I stopped and talked with a sheriff’s deputy, who said he had stopped traffic when he saw a giant fireball in the sky.”
That fireball was caused by the impact of the DC-9 jet crashing onto Middlebelt Road. The fuselage exploded into thousands of pieces. I’ll never forget the images of body bags among the debris. Rick, who now leads the Michigan Public Radio Network in Lansing, saw the wreckage from a bridge.
“I looked down and there was just smoldering sheet metal,” Rick says. “The plane had basically backed up entirely onto the bridge, and I stayed there and took it in for a while. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.”
How did it happen?
Investigators believed human error most likely caused the crash.
“The National Traffic Safety Administration determines that the probable cause of the accident was the flight crew’s failure to use the taxi checklist to ensure that the flaps and slats were extended for takeoff.” — NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, page 68.
The report says another contributing factor to the crash was an unexplained power outage to the jet’s takeoff warning system, which failed to alert the flight crew the plane was not ready to fly.
The crash killed 156, including two people on the ground, the flight crew, and every passenger except one — Cecilia Cechan. Romulus firefighter Ron Thiede found the 4-year-old girl alive, still buckled in a booster seat strapped to her airline chair. She lost her parents and her 6-year-old brother. Relatives took her in, protecting her from the media throughout her childhood. She spoke publicly about the accident for the first time in 2013 as part of a documentary on sole survivors of disasters.
Over the years, families of the victims have gathered at a black granite memorial near I-94 and Middlebelt to mark the anniversary of the disaster. Many will do so again on Aug. 16, 2017 at 8:46 p.m., the time of the accident.
I have not visited the memorial. I’ve only caught glimpses of it from one of the on-ramps to westbound I-94. Each time I drive through Middlebelt and Goddard, I see the burn marks on the railroad bridge just north of the intersection. And I remember that humid night 30 years ago.
NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, Northwest Flight 255 by WDET 101.9 FM on Scribd
